There have been three main approaches to creating interactive storytelling technology: the unsuccessful “Branching Narrative” and “Narrative Game”, and Storytronics.


Branching Narrative - Lots of Story, Little Interactivity

This began as a technique for creating semi-interactive storytelling using good old paper books - a Branching Narrative book would be read like a normal novel, except it was written in second person, as in “you go, you see, you hear”, it had very short chapters, and at the end of each chapter one was given several choices for advancing the plot, each of which meant skipping to a different chapter as a continuation of the last one. A Branching Narrative can thus be described as a flow chart where each node is a chapter, and the nodes flowing from it are the alternative chapters offered to the reader to advance the plot to. The computer adaptations of this technique changed it little - the earlier adaptations, called “Interactive Fiction”, contained a larger, more complex and coherent flowchart, more text, and, usually, a myriad of puzzles which must be solved by the reader before the story advances. Later adaptations replaced textual representations with video scenes, but otherwise made no changes to the basic scheme.

This method suffered from two major drawbacks: first, many of the choices offered to the reader lead to an uninteresting story; one that was cut too short, ran too long, repeated itself or made no sense. Second, this method imposed severe restrictions on the player’s freedom of choice. There is no practical way to construct a flow chart large enough to give the reader true control - such a flowchart would require literally billions of nodes, linked together in an astoundingly complex logical structure. Instead, Branching Narratives usually give one the feeling of choosing “the lesser of two evils” between two options, because one is not allowed to do what one really wants to. Furthermore, many such narratives employ a technique called “foldback”, where two or more options lead to the same practical result.


Narrative Games - Lots of Interactivity, Little Story

There have been many computer games which claimed to provide the experience of interactive storytelling. While computer games are, of course, interactive, there has yet to appear one which provided interactive storytelling. The reason for this is quite simple - the interaction in computer games is not of a narrative nature. One interacts with guns, alien monsters, tanks and spaceships, but one does not interact with thinking, feeling interactive depictions of dramatic characters. Further, this interaction deals with things that are exterior to storytelling. For example, in a computer game it is very important where, exactly, one places one’s person, but in stories this is so irrelevant that it is rarely even mentioned.

What storytelling some computer games do have is tacked onto this completely story-less interaction - either as cinematic cut scenes, text that pops up during gameplay, or, in the best of them, as what is called “in-game cinematics”, where a non-interactive narrative scene is played out by the same on-screen characters which appear during the interactive gameplay. Sometimes this tacked-on storytelling is of the Branching Narrative sort, but it remains an unsuccessful interactive storytelling experience tacked onto an interactive experience with no storytelling.


Storytronics - Lots of Both Story and Interactivity

Even though Storytronics has the strengths of both the previously described methods, and the weaknesses of neither, it is not "the best of both worlds" - it is a radically new paradigm that redefines everything. The basic concept in Storytronics is that interactive storytelling is first an interactive experience - that is, it is not an experience where the player's main role is to read text or watch footage, sometimes getting the attractive opportunity to "choose the lesser of two evils". It is an experience where the player has volition, and is at liberty not merely to choose between narrative possibilities, but to behave in whichever way he or she likes, thus freely directing the course of the drama. The computer-controlled characters, likewise, behave according to their unique personalities, reacting dynamically to the player's behavior.

This is made possible using the concept of the Verb. Storytronics uses Verbs to define what may happen in interactive storytelling. Each Verb represents one possible dramatic action, like a kiss, a demand, or an advice. Once a Verb has been defined, it may be used indefinitely. For example, once a single Verb Kiss is defined, any character will be able to kiss any other. Depending on the context and the Adverb used, this kiss could also mean several different things, from a friendly greeting to a statement of reverence to a passionate lovemaking, or even a murderous act (think Judas). When more than a thousand Verbs are used together, the richness of possible behaviors stretches across horizons. When each Verb also defines what kinds of consequences it has and what reactions it may warrant, these possibilities can be organized into complex cause-and-effect relationships that allow the interaction to maintain a coherent and narrative form, no matter how adventurous the player's behavior.